Re: NSE Host Groups and Previous Host Accessibility

[Patrick Donnelly <batrick () batbytes com>]

Hi David,

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 4:27 PM, David Fifield<david () bamsoftware com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 09:05:19PM -0400, Patrick Donnelly wrote:
> > Right now NSE keeps old hosts in the "current_hosts" table (in the Lua
> > Registry [1]) even after the current host group has finished. This
> > means that scripts can modify these hosts (change port version, port
> > state, etc.) in a different host group. There are possibly some good
> > reasons for doing this and possibly some scripts already doing this. I
> > wondered if anyone would be against disallowing the use of hosts from
> > an old host group (as I believe it was originally intended) in the
> > future.
>
> If you can modify hosts from previous host groups I think that's
> contrary to intention. These are hosts whose output has already been
> printed, after all. Do these records never go away, and keep consuming
> memory?

I just checked, the Targets are freed after results are printed. So,
when a script in another hostgroup tries to use a freed host we will
have some memory problems. I confirmed this with valgrind. I'll go
ahead and fix this.

-- 
-Patrick Donnelly

"Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly: Men freely
ford that see the shallows."

- Benjamin Franklin

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